


Quoth the Raven

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Tag: s09e10 Face the Raven, Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, Gen, Goodbyes, Grief, Memory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 05:36:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5572917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Oh, Clara,” whispers the Doctor. “You are gone, and I’ll go on. Why can’t I be like you?”</p>
<p>A triptych of scenes: of loss, and of memory, and of after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quoth the Raven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DaraOakwise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaraOakwise/gifts).



> A Christmas gift for my beloved beta Dara, and as such un-betaed by her. All mistakes are mine!

_“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee_

_Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! –“_

***

The Mayor offers them her room, but then of course she does.

Guilt is a wonderful motivator, after all, guilt and grief and horror – the Doctor knows this. Feels it. Feels it in the strength in his legs as he unfreezes from the doorframe, runs forward; feels it in the tension stopping his hands from shaking and his body from collapsing and his teeth from pressing right down into his jaw. Feels the rush of it, like adrenaline, like fire, forcing him on, keeping him standing, making him move rather than dissolve. Grief and guilt and horror, steadying in his veins, in his shoulders and in his arms.

In his velvet-clad arms, where he is holding her.

She is so light, his Clara. Light and beautiful, arms spread like wings. A bluebird. She might fly.

He brings her inside and shuts the door.

The door: wood. He bolts it shut. Jams a chair under the lock and adjusts the light. It’s an old-fashioned lamp, lit with a kerosene flame; he twists the dial, feeding it, tinting the room a glowing gold, casting shadows on the walls. All this time he has her in his arms. It’s not like she’s particularly heavy, anyway.

He could carry her forever, if he had to.

“Clara,” he says, loudly, bold and bright into the still air. Then, again: “Clara,” soft and tender, long fingers tangled up in her hair. Her cheek is cool against his elbow, cool and smooth and soft. Through the thick velvet of his coat he cannot feel it, but he could learn to. He could try.

If he had to, he could carry her forever. “Clara,” says the Doctor, one more time. It comes out rough and broken, it comes out sounding wrong. But it tastes the same, tastes familiar instead of foreign, flows from his throat easy as breathing out of lungs that carry her still.

And his hearts –

In his wrist: a throbbing. In his palm, Clara’s hand. It sits like it belongs there: Clara’s fingers, cupped in his; Clara’s palm, rough and soft and cooling. He places it over the vein, over his pulse. Presses down.

 “Take it,” he whispers. “Take it. I’ve got two heartbeats, Clara. Two. Little piddling species like yours can make do with one, so you know what that means –I’ve got one spare.”

Her fingers are cold. His hearts race, then slow, then stop. He feels them stop. They have to stop.

Her fingers are cold, and he is still breathing.

Her fingers are cold. He is still breathing. It isn’t _fair_.

All of a sudden his arms ache.  

In the corner of the room is a bed, white sheets spotless, pulled tight with hospital sterility. Laid upon it, Clara is a splash of colour, a bright light – her sallow cheeks rose-gold by comparison, her hair pooling around her in a golden-brown halo. The sheet is a canvas and she is a painting, captured in a moment between one heartbeat and the next. Static, but not still. Caught but not killed. Release her and she might breathe, her heart might beat. She might wake.

“There is a planet, Clara,” says the Doctor, “with a moon made of cut crystal.”

_Cut crystal?_ says Clara, on a giggle, a breath of incredulity and wonder. He can hear her, almost. He can hear – he can _hear_ her, he can. _What, like glass? First the moon is an egg, and now it’s my Gran’s best goblets?_  

“It catches all the light from its sun, see,” he says, ignoring her, of course. He always does, he –  “refracts it like a prism, then reflects it back inside. So it’s always shining, day or night – glowing from within, a million million colours.”

Her hand is still cold, cooling by the second, but he has not let it go. He sits on the edge of the bed, and for a moment it feels like before, a night long ago, their last Christmas. _Please_ , says the beat of his hearts, staccato and cruel. _Don’t even argue_.

“We could go there,” he says. “We could go – there is a forest, thousands of miles wide, where each and every tree bears a different kind of flower. And when the breezes blow, the scents of the flowers mix to form a new and incredible perfume. Every breeze is different. Every breath you take will be filled with a scent unique in all of history.”

_Wow, really!_ “Really, Clara.”

Her face – still. Her lips don’t move. Her eyelids don’t flutter. But he can hear her, he can, he _can_. Clara Oswald, in his head. She doesn’t leave. She won’t.

He can see her, too. Her mouth, curving in a smile small but rich with possibility, her hands warm and blood-thrumming, resting on a lever. The set of her shoulders, that look in her eyes. That hunger. That life. The question:

_Then what are you waiting for?_

“You,” the Doctor says, “to wake up.”

She’d laugh at that, she would – _silly, impatient old man, come back in the morning_ – and he can almost taste it, the breath of her laughter, her exasperation, her warmth. He can see her grin. Hear her laugh. He can – no.

But no.

No, because: he can never not see her, can he, not when she’s here standing in front of him. Because: he’s done this before, hasn’t he, superimposed an image of the girl he’d like to see over the woman she actually was. It wasn’t fair then. It isn’t fair now. No – he will see her as she is, he has always owed her this much. He sees her as she is.

He sees:

His Clara, lying on the Mayor’s bed, the weight of her body rumpling her white sheets. Cold fingers slowly stiffening, a chest that lies silent, still. Clara’s lips, turning pale, slack like sleep; her eyes, closed and unseeing, shut tight. Her arms slightly outstretched, like birds’ wings, but no feathers and no flight. No breath. No heartbeat. And no Clara, not his Clara. Not anymore.

It’s just a body, now. Clara is gone.   

“Oh, Clara,” whispers the Doctor. “You are gone, and I’ll go on. Why can’t I be like you?”

She doesn’t answer, but of course she doesn’t.

He lets go of her hand. He’ll never hold it again. He would have held it forever, if he could.

As he leaves the room he turns out the light.

The Mayor meets him at the door. She faces him in profile, half-hidden in shadow, and he’s far too tired to think about what that must mean.

“Did you,” she says, quiet, “did you say what you needed to say?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to, really. There were things, yes, of course there were things – but Clara had told him not to say them, and he always does what she asks.

“You’re lucky, you know,” he says, instead. His eyes are hard. “You’ll forget this – this tragedy. You’ll forget what you’ve done. One day.”

He waits. She turns to face him, gaze soft with sorrow. His fists clench. “But I won’t.”

“Doctor,” says the Mayor, “I’m sorry.”

He knows.

***

“I’m sorry,” says Me, her eyes lowered, her voice quiet. It rings loud, anyway, over the foreign hum of this unfamiliar TARDIS, over the thrum of the console and the Doctor’s softer breathing. Over the silence in the air, the silence in her chest, Clara hears it like a bell.

“What for?” asks Clara, her smile like quicksilver. Outside those doors the world is dying. “It’s the end of the universe. There are – stars collapsing, out there,” and she can hear them, almost, the sucking sound of the vacuum they fall into, the dead silence of the void.

It rings in her ears, this silence, where once she knows she could hear the stars. It’d been wondrous, once, she remembers, until it’d become as familiar as a heartbeat, until it’d become so essential she’d learned not to hear.

She shrugs, lightly. Outside, the emptiness roars, and inside – “What’s in here to be sorry for?”

Me gives her a look, all hooded eyes and pursed lips and centuries of knowledge tumbling into perception. It’s a careful look, searching, considering. Beside her, the Doctor lies on silver grating, his eyes closed and his cheeks pale, and Clara doesn’t have the energy for this.

“Yes, the dying of the stars,” says Me. “I’ve watched whole planets burn away to dust, seen supernovas burn out and turn to blackness. The whole of creation, disintegrating.”

She meets Clara’s eyes, chin tipped downward, eyes wide. “I’m sorry,” she says, again, and her voice is heavy and honest and it sucks all the air out of the room.

Under Clara’s thumb, the Doctor’s skin is rough and soft and cool. She traces the planes of his cheekbones, all sharp angles and hard edges and soft hidden smile lines, runs the pad of her thumb over the tender shadows under his eyes. Strokes the curls off his forehead, smoothes the tired creases in his brow. Her palm cups his jaw and it fits there, a matching puzzle piece, completion.  

All this geometry, topography, the shapes and the slopes and the lay of the land. She knows this face like she knows her own, like she knows the layout of her flat and the texture of her sheets. Like she knew the curve of her mother’s smile, the smell of Danny’s skin. She runs her fingers over his temples and his eyebrows and the edges of his lips, lands she could explore without a guide, now, a path she could trace from memory.

Memory. Ha.

“I never wanted this, you know,” says Clara. “Never.”

It’s true, too. She remembers the look in his eyes when she’d returned to him, that hunger and desperation, that desire and comfort and _pain_. Remembers how his hand had felt in hers, that last time and the last time after that. There were things she wanted, yes. Of course there were. But none of them were this.

The skin beneath his eyes is dark and barely swollen. “I,” Clara says, and bites her lip.

Me cocks her head, blinks. “You… what?”

“Nothing,” says Clara. “Nothing.”

Silence for a moment, and Clara can hear herself breathing. She’s acutely aware of it, now, the swell of her chest on the inhale, the hold, the release. _It’s just a habit_ , she hears the Doctor say, _you don’t really need it_ , but he’d never realised, had he, that these things had never been mutually exclusive?

“Did you tell him?” asks Me, after a moment, and Clara hates that neither of them need to ask what she means.

“Does it matter?” and Clara says it loud, now, her voice echoes off the shining white walls and it’s so empty in here, isn’t it? “He wouldn’t remember if I did. When he wakes up, he won’t remember a thing I’ve ever said to him. Won’t remember my face, or my voice. I’ll just be – gone.”

She’s frozen. That’s what the Doctor told her – frozen, her bodily processes caught in stasis, held still in a moment of her time. She doesn’t need to breathe, and her heart doesn’t beat, and she’ll never age or grow or get sick or die without that raven, so how, how can she be crying?

“I tore myself apart for him once. For him, and for the universe, and I never asked for him to save me. I just asked for him to remember,” and she smiles at this, small and sharp and heartbreaking. “That’s all I wanted, was for him to remember.”

Inhale, hold, release. There is wetness on her cheeks. Impossible tears, but hey, she’s the Impossible Girl. She can breathe through them. She does.

Me watches her, careful, curious. She places a hand on Clara’s shoulder, and her touch is painfully gentle.

“What do you want now?” she asks, and Clara has nothing to say.

“I had journals, once,” says Me, voice casual, fingers squeezing Clara’s shoulder blade. “They burned. I made digital copies, of course, but you can’t really find any decent computers at the end of the universe.”

She pauses. Waits. After a moment Clara meets her eyes.

“There are people who made me, Clara,” says Me. “I don’t remember most of them. But here I am.”

There is a silence, thick and long, papered over by the hum of foreign engines and the thrum of a console and the beating of three hearts, and the sucking of the vacuum that is fading from Clara’s chest. She rubs the heels of her hands over her eyes, and sighs, and lets go.

 “It’s for the best,” she says, smiling broken but bright. “It’s – for the best, isn’t it? I get to keep my history, and he…”

“He would have carried you forever,” says Me, and her voice is firm and strong and unshakeable. It sounds like fact, like truth, like absolution. “And now he won’t.”

Clara nods, slow but sure, and rises.

The silence is quieter now, gentler and lighter and kinder, but she fills it anyway with the flicking of switches and the snapping of levers, the grind of the engines as she takes them away. She fills the silence, and she pulls back her hair, and she dries her eyes and bites her lip and doesn’t look at the man on the grating and doesn’t admit the need to break the quiet.

It’s Me who does it, in the end, as they land. Just a small voice, soft and gentle, nearly smothered by the not-silence left by the lack of the end of all things. 

“It matters, Clara,” says Me, and Clara hears it loud and clear.

She knows.

***

He finds what he is looking for in a marketplace on Sto, in between the stalls draped in cadmium and wine. A young woman – small and compact and brunette, smile tipped in starlight. Round cheeks, delicate features. Huge dark eyes.

He comes up behind her, places a hand on her shoulder. She turns, and he _knows_. “It’s you.”

“Yes,” she agrees, and smiles. “it _is_ Me.”

For a moment, he just stares. She looks – well, _well,_ really, that’s the best description, with a light in her eyes and a bounce in her step he doesn’t remember seeing in her since before she changed her name. His memories are fuzzy, but he remembers: the dull sullen darkness in her eyes. He remembers hating her. Here, now, she is enchanting. He remembers –

_Fight you for her_ , a voice says, tones sliding and slipping and warping, a voice he knows but has forgotten, he can’t quite hear, he reaches for it but it flits away and he can’t –

“With a capital,” she adds, helpfully.

For a moment, a flash of anger: the voice is gone, chased out of the wind by hers. But then again, it was never truly _here_ , no, never truly his.

He snorts. “That’s a bit narcissistic, isn’t it?”

“This from the Doctor,” she says, the twist of her smile amused and sardonic, “Mr Definite Article.”

She stands utterly relaxed as she looks at him, shoulders loose, hands tucked into her pockets. Her pockets: trans-dimensional, by the looks of it, the tunic around them cut from undulating silver-grey hypersilk, worn here two centuries before its time. She, herself, on a planet far from home. Around her: a cloud of gold, almost imperceptible, all but invisible. He can smell it, though. Taste the tang of huon particles at the back of his throat, feel it on the wind, the leftover glow of the ship she surely must have travelled in to get here.

He couldn’t track it, probably. More than likely. But it tugs at him, the nearness of it, of that ship, of _her_ – it tugs.

The woman in front of him narrows her eyes. “I’m not going to tell you where she is,” she says, voice hostile and pitying and gentle and harsh all at once, a muddle. The Doctor raises an eyebrow.

“I’m not asking.”

“But you want to know.”

“Don’t be stupid,” snaps the Doctor, “of course I want to know. But I’m not asking.”

He could. She’d never give him a proper answer, but that would even make it easier – he could ask, and it wouldn’t make a particle of difference. He could ask, and there would be no consequences.

No – stupid lie. There are always consequences.

“There are things ,” he says, instead, after a moment, “that I meant to tell her. Things I meant to say. And I don’t think I ever really did.” He pauses, takes a breath. The air smells of autumn. “They were – important.”

She gives him a look, long and hard and calculating.

“Yes,” she says, at last. “I’ll tell her, if you like.”

“No,” says the Doctor, “don’t you dare.”

For an instant, silence – imperfect, of course, punctuated by the shuffling of feet and the tinkling chime of coins, the bustle and haggle-chatter of a marketplace. Spiced with the scent of clove and wine in the air, warm and rich and noisy.

But all the same, a silence, and in it the Doctor can hear his hearts beat.

 “She doesn’t want you to keep looking for her,” says Me, over the drumbeat in his chest. “She said – you did that once before. Chased her ghost. You did her a great disservice then, I think.”

She cocks her head, looks the Doctor in the eye. “I think you’re doing her one now.”

Her gaze should unsettle him, he knows. Should stir something in him, a guilty flutter in his hearts, a reminder of – something, some failure, some injustice he’d have been ashamed to commit. It’s gone, though, the memory. There’s nothing there, not shame or regret or the image of an impossible woman’s perfect smile, nothing where her words probe but a phantom skip in his pulse.

He feels the skip. He meets her eyes, unwavering.

“I didn’t come here to find her,” says the Doctor, “I came here to find _you_.”

She – Me – she blinks. “Why?”

“To ask you something. A question.”

A pause. She tracks him with her eyes, his every twitch, every movement. Searching for – something. Memory, perhaps, or malice. Or nothing more than answers, information. Understandable – she hardly knows him now. And he never really knew her at all.

“Well,” says Me, with the smallest of shrugs, “go on then.”

In his memory, an empty space, a hole ripped out of his life, a blessing lost, a nothing. In his chest, a pair of hearts, whole where cracks should be. There is a question here, in the midst of it. There is only really one big question.

“Does it really help, forgetting?” asks the Doctor. “When you lose someone. Is it actually – is it actually _better_?”

Me smiles. It’s a different smile, this time, warm and twisted and wry. “I wouldn’t know,” she says, and there’s bitterness there, and humour. “I’ve never remembered anyone long enough.”

He laughs at that. It’s funny.

“I suppose,” she says, thoughtful, “sometimes, the pain of the loss could turn you into a monster.” Her gaze sharpens suddenly, hawk-like and piercing. “That happens, I believe.”

The Doctor stares back. “And then?”

“And then – I don’t know. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn’t.” She shrugs, fully this time, shoulders rising and falling and releasing the weight of everything she cannot say. “Tell me, Doctor. Are you still playing that song?”

The Doctor flinches. For once her words catch on something he can feel, something he could almost name, and it. It feels – strange. Painful, and powerful, like a return or a release or a dagger to the chest. It – _feels._

He breathes deep, doesn’t respond, but perhaps he has his answer anyway.

 “Well,” says Me, after a moment. Her smile is bright again, laced with wanderlust and delight. “Best be on my way. Goodbye, Doctor.”

She takes a step. Behind her, a voice:

“Ashildr.”

It’s not her name, but she turns anyway.

“I forgive you,” says the Doctor.

She nods. “I appreciate that.”

He nods back, tucks his hands into his pockets: conversation over. But he doesn’t turn, doesn’t take his eyes off her, and all of a sudden she realises that he’s not the only one with important things left unsaid.

“Doctor,” she says, and there’s an urgency in her voice, a solemnity. But she’s smiling, still. “She loves you too.”

She can hear him still, as she walks away. Hear him shifting, hear his footsteps. Hear his breath, the softest whisper. Hear him humming something – a song, she knows, though the notes get lost on the wind, and she can’t quite name the melody.

Another step, another, and still she can hear: his voice, like an echo, like a heart, beating for two.

Far away, she can hear him smile.

“I know.”

***

_“ –Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!”_

_Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”_


End file.
